In the fall of 2017 I went back to school. There were a lot of factors that went in to the decision. Long story short, I decided it was finally time to finish my undergrad studies, after a 14 year hiatus. My major is psychology, with the goal of getting my master's in art therapy after finishing my bachelor's degree. The art therapy program requires a lot of studio art classes as a prerequisite to apply.

The first art class I took as a college student was Introduction to Sculpture. I was so nervous when I registered, thinking I knew absolutely nothing about making sculpture. But it turned out to be a fun semester. And I learned that sculpture can be anything.

found objects self-portrait, Laura Hartrich 2017

Our first assignment was to make a self-portrait out of found objects. I had plenty of materials to work with since I've been collecting little bits and interesting objects for most of my life. I made the wooden stand in the wood shop at school. As I made this self portrait I was thinking about my domestic life of 14 years as a stay-at-home mom, a new life I was building toward with the decision to go back to school, and the sometimes-scary, often overwhelming and uncomfortable balancing act it will require. So basically that house is me, hanging on for dear life.

found objects self-portrait, Laura Hartrich 2017

Our next assignment was to take a familiar object and make it into another, recognizable object. I struggled to commit to a concept but finally decided to make a soup pot out of a quilt. We were required to use chicken wire for this assignment, so that's what I used to form the pot, and the ladle. I then proceeded to dye an old quilt I thrifted. I was going for grey but it came out rather purple-y. I hand-sewed the quilt into place around the chicken wire structure. For the lid I bought a big plastic garbage can lid and covered it in quilt. I borrowed hardware from my son's dresser to make the handles.

When I presented this sculpture, my class had a lot of interesting ideas about what it might be about. There was a lot of discussion about domesticity, femininity, softness, and motherhood. In truth, when I made it I was thinking about how much I hate to cook because it takes time away from the quilting I'd rather be doing.

Instructions for the cooperative sculpture.

For my third assignment I was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings. He used to write simple instructions and have assistants execute them. I liked the idea of other people participating in creating a work. So I pieced these quilt blocks, measuring 12”x12”. I affixed some batting to the wall so that the blocks could stay on the wall but also be easily moved around. I presented the instructions shown here, and my fellow students put the blocks in the arrangement above. The students enjoyed the exercise of playing with color and movement in the layout of the blocks. I was really pleased that basically using a design wall could count as sculpture in my professor’s very generous definition.

For our final assignment we were given full freedom, though our professor told us to think big. It had been about a year since the passing of my grandma, and I was thinking about her a lot. She was my last living grandparent. I have vivid memories of spending time in her little house in Southern Illinois. One summer I stayed with her, by myself, for a couple weeks. We had adventures. Stringing beads. Feeding food coloring to Queen Anne’s lace. Putting pennies on the train tracks behind her house. Later, I didn’t want to stay home and go to community college. So I moved in with her and went to community college. I was a terrible roommate, that’s for sure. But I still treasure the nights we spent washing dishes, playing Scrabble, watching the Bachelor. I felt closer to her than any of my other grandparents because of all the opportunities I had to spend time with her. And I miss her.

The piece I made for my sculpture final was called Fort, and it’s about loss and memory and seeing through the fog of time. The materials include a lot of nods to my grandma… her doilies and linens, her cut up blankets and notebooks, photos of her, flattened pennies. And of course you can see that I incorporated the memory quilt I made using her clothes and linens. I wanted to make this piece to resemble a fort that a child might make out of blankets and pillows from around the house. I wish it was hanging more horizontally (more taut), and a little lower. But in the space we had, and with the time we had to install, this was the best I could do. I had a lot of help from Nate for the installation process. And the piece was well received during my final critique. Sculpture class isn’t so scary after all.

My last living grandparent passed away in early 2016. My dad's mom lived to be 90, and lived independently very nearly until the end. She was wonderful in many ways. She was sweet and funny, crafty and thrifty, made THE BEST scrambled eggs, popcorn, and lasagna, and had the greatest stories about her life as a young woman.

When I was a little girl (around 6 years old, I think), I spent 3 weeks at her house during the summer. It was much too long for a kid that age, and I was a homesick wreck by the end. Still, I have a lot of great memories from that trip. We took walks, put coins on the train tracks, picked Queen Anne's lace which we then put in a cup of food colored water. We made seed bead bracelets and I repeatedly spilled the bowl of beads we were working from. We would patiently pick them up together. Once I spilled an entire bottle of Calamine lotion on her carpet. Again she surprised me with her calm reaction. Coming back from one of our walks one evening, I ran ahead and locked the back door and the front door and then ran out again. I had locked us out of the house. I think I thought it would be funny, but I was soon in tears realizing it was not actually a good joke at all. Grandma took it all in stride, again, and calmly found a neighbor to help us pick one of the locks and get back into the house.

Grandma and me, 2001

I think because of the good experience of staying with her that summer, I always felt close to her. When I graduated high school, instead of staying home and enrolling in community college, I decided to move in with her and attend one near her. I was a terrible roommate, self centered and inconsiderate. I know she must have been irritated with me much of the time but once again I felt so close to her because of the time we spent together. We watched the first season of The Bachelor together and had to hide our eyes and giggle when things got too sexy in the last few episodes (same thing when we watched Coming Home with Jane Fonda). I was vegetarian at the time and she went out of her way to cook things completely foreign to her so that I could eat. We spent countless hours chatting in the kitchen as she washed dishes and I dried. She beat me at Scrabble many times. She was still playing with and beating my parents until a few weeks before she died. I wish I had recorded some of her stories somehow, and I wish I hadn't waited so long to make her a quilt. She only got to use the one I made her for a few weeks.

One of grandma's garments I included in the quilt

Stack of clothes, waiting to be cut

My parents and sister did most of the work of cleaning out her house after she was gone. I asked them to set aside some things I could use to make a quilt. They delivered a large box full of clothes and bed linens, and also lots of my grandma's own craft projects, like doilies, or table runners she had embroidered. These items sat in my house for over a year before I was ready to cut into them and make this quilt. They carried the smell of my grandma's house so strongly. It was an emotional experience just to open the box. After a couple false starts, I finally got going.

Ovals in progress

Ovals cut in half

I decided to make these oval shapes to represent the pennies we used to smoosh on the train tracks behind Grandma's house. I used the six-minute circle method to piece them, and was happy to discover the technique also works for shapes that aren't perfect circles. Once the ovals were made I cut some into halves and some into quarters and mixed them all up. I felt inspired to include another design element... I had always been fascinated by notebooks full of Gregg shorthand that my Grandma used for practice during her time in secretarial school. The secret-codedness of it all was intriguing to me and I thought the lines were beautiful. I decided to applique shorthand symbols over the top of the flattened penny shapes, and I chose words that describe the attributes I most admired in my Grandma. Patience, generosity, love, curiosity, humor, service, fortitude, and neatness.

shorthand symbols applied with a bias tape machine applique technique

This quilt was emotionally challenging at first. Then it developed into a technical challenge. I've never worked with so many different types of fabrics before. There are silks and polyesters in here, along with cottons of all different weights. There are thick fuzzy blankets, and nubby hobnail bedspreads. I put interfacing behind the stretchy fabrics and forged ahead. It's extremely thick in some spots but my Juki handled all the different fabrics beautifully. I quilted this one myself. I was proud to have it hang in the juried show at QuiltCon 2018. Thanks to Mitch Hopper for taking final photos for me, the last four images here are by him.

Final quilt, measures 51" x 63"

quilting detail

back of quilt. I used a flannel sheet found in my grandma's house, new in its packaging.

Naive Melody by the Talking Heads has been a favorite song for years. I wanted to make another quilt using the Drunkard's Path alphabet I designed, and this lyric, "Never for money / always for love," emerged as a phrase I love enough to put on a quilt. I think of it as an unofficial, cheeky motto for my quilt-making. When you're a quilter, people are constantly asking you if you sell your quilts. And, well, here is my answer.

pieces cut

sketchbook and palette, inspired by a notebook cover

binding, pieced with leftover squares

drunkard's path progress

pieced top in progress

pieced top in progress

I decided to attempt matchstick quilting for the first time on this quilt. I had.... issues. In an attempt to hide, yes, I'll admit it, the puckers created by botched matchstick quilting, I decided to add lots of big stitch hand-quilting. That was two years ago. I'm still working on this quilt, slowly adding hand stitches in beautiful variagated embroidery floss. I love the look and the texture, but it's taking stinking forever. I've probably logged over 60 hours in hand stitching on this, and no end in sight. I don't know if I'll ever be officially *done* with this quilt. If I do ever finish it, I'll post updated final photos.

I never expected to turn into a cat lady. Growing up my family had cats but they lived harsh, short lives in the out-of-doors. I learned not to get too attached.

When my kids got bigger one of them wanted a snake. I wasn't into it. My husband convinced me we should talk the kid into a cat instead. And so we did. And then I fell in love. Hard.`I was so charmed by the way our cats (yes, plural, as we soon got a second) moved and played, so delighted by the way my kids connected with them. I posted cute cat videos on my social media. I started noticing all the very cute cat-themed items available for purchase in this world. I bought a cat shirt and cat pins. Probably some other stuff I can't remember. People started giving me gifts with a cat motif which was rough because I'm extremely picky about my cat motifs. I felt like this was all becoming too much. I felt like a too much of a nerdy cat lady, basically. So I came up with the perfect way to cool it with the random cat purchases but still fully indulge my cat obsession. FABRIC DUH. I started buying up all the cute cat-themed novelty fabric I could find. I wondered if I could possibly make an all cat fabric quilt that didn't look completely tacky and garish. The most modern-aesthetic cat-quilt ever made. That was my goal.

The first full color wheel I made used all of my favorite prints, all of the best colors. I had trouble finding orange cat-fabrics that weren't Halloween themed. I ended up dyeing a couple fabrics with white backgrounds in order to fill out the orange quadrant. I used my absolute favorite neutral kitty print as a background. I had to search and scrounge for it, since it was an older and popular Lizzy House print. I had *just* enough of it to finish the top. This quilt was given to my daughter and hangs above her bed. She loves it and it totally makes the room.

The back of this quilt has all the wedges I cut from the neutral prints. They didn't fit into the rainbow color wheel but made their own striking version against the blue background prints I chose.

Kitty Color Wheel

Kitty Color Wheel hanging on slanted wall

Back of Kitty Color Wheel Quilt

I made a second kitty color wheel, a more scrappy version, with a varying background and second-tier colors and prints. This was a gift for kids I babysat for three years, a parting gift as our time together came to an end. Their color wheel wasn't as strong as the first version I made, but it still made for a cute gift. I used more cat prints to piece the back of their quilt too.

Kitty Color Wheel #2

Back of Kitty Color Wheel #2

Label for Kitty Color Wheel #2, a gift for some special kids in my life

Around the same time as my kitty color wheels were taking shape, my guild embarked on a medallion-a-long. I had never made a medallion quilt before (a quilt that grows by adding borders around a central block, rather than by adding rows to each other), so I was eager to give it a go. The Seattle Modern Quilt Guild kindly agreed to let us use their 2015 pattern. I started off with this pattern but didn't stick to it strictly. I worked out my own designs for several of the borders. The challenge with this quilt was to stick to 100% cat novelty prints, but keep an eye on the overall composition of the quilt, especially in regards to color and contrast. In the end I was very happy with how it turned out. Nikki Maroon did the gorgeous quilting for me, and Mitch Hopper took the final photos. It measures 83" square. Big beautiful girl. I put 12" square cat fabrics on the back to use up my stash. I really think I've scratched that cat-fabric itch and won't need to make any more quilts with this theme. Like, ever again.

All Cat Everything medallion quilt

center block of medallion quilt

corner detail

back of quilt

And here are the two knuckleheads who started the whole thing... Lupin and Sirius.

The wheels started turning for this quilt when my husband Nate asked me one day, "Has anyone ever used quilts as data visualization tools? Like infographic quilts?" I said I didn't know, but it sounded like an interesting idea. I thought about what data I'd like to document in a quilt, and settled on something very personal, my New Year's goals. I have always been a person who makes New Year's Resolutions, despite repeatedly reading that they don't work, no one every keeps them, etc. I didn't care, I made them anyway, always hopeful for the self improvement they might bring.

A few years ago I noticed an Instagram friend talking about her measurable goals for the year. More specific than the hazy concept of New Year's Resolutions, measurable goals have a number attached to them. I decided to adapt her approach. For 2014, I had 14 measurable goals. I assigned a traditional quilt block to each goal. (I picked 14 different blocks that were made from half-square triangles, just blocks that I visually liked). The idea was to make a block for each of the times I was supposed to do each task. So if my goal was to host friends for dinner 4 times in the course of the year, I'd make 4 blocks. If I met my goal, those 4 blocks would go on the front of the quilt. For goals that I didn't meet, I'd break it down into a ratio. For instance, I only listened to 6 audiobooks, when my goal was 20 (too much tv). So 6 of those blocks went on the front of the quilt. The remaining 14 blocks were pieced into the back of the quilt. And if I exceeded my goal, I made the extra blocks in a different colorway (red/orange/yellow). There is a key on the label of the quilt, so viewers can understand it, and also so I can remember everything.

This quilt has a lot of tiny piecing and a lot of piecing in general. While I started it in 2014 when I was actively trying to accomplish all these measurable goals, it took until 2017 to finally finish it. Nikki Maroon quilted it for me, and Mitch Hopper helped me design the label, which I then printed on Spoonflower. Mitch Hopper also helped me take pictures of the final product. This quilt measures 53"x78". I was happy to have it accepted into the juried show at QuiltCon 2018.